Advice to graduates: Embrace uselessness

ROBERT ZARETSKY, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, May 9, 2010

Academics today no longer have the luxury to tell themselves, as they had in Plato's day, “Ah, if only I were philosopher-king.” Two millennia later, we are now reduced to muttering, “Arghh, if only I were this year's commencement speaker.”

I confess. I don't know who the speaker is at this year's University of Houston graduation ceremony, but I wager I do know what our distinguished guest will say. Hands gripping the podium, jaw jutting toward the wilting field of fading gowns, the speaker will urge the graduating class to march, diplomas blazing their path, into the world and … yes, make it a better place. The speaker will, in a word, exhort the students to be useful.

All this is as predictable as the summer heat that turns mortarboards into waffle irons and graduation robes into iron maidens. But as I wipe my sweaty brow with the sodden sleeve of my gown, I will again ask myself if such exhortations are themselves, well, useful. Or, for that matter, desirable. As in years past, I will imagine myself behind that same podium. With my own jaw jutting out, and hands athwart the podium, I will fix my eyes on the graduating seniors and urge them to march out into the world and dare to be … useless.

Praise of uselessness has never been fashionable in our society. We are all descendants of immigrants, beginning with the Puritans, for whom work was sacred. Investing time and money in the art of uselessness seems even more nonsensical at a time when the economy is frail, jobs are scarce and university tuitions are on the rise. No doubt the parents and families of students would find my advice perverse. With the 15 minutes of fame or infamy I've been granted to speak, I would do my best to explain.

By uselessness, I don't mean rooting for our hometown team, the Astros, to win a game. Or waiting for the predicted dawn of post-partisan politics in Washington. Such activities are useless insofar as they are futile. No less futile are our national addictions to texting and tweeting. To be sure, with cell phones in hand and our thumbs a blur of activity, we seem to be doing something, well, important. But is this frenzied activity anything more than our futile need to be reassured of our existence every few seconds by an equally needy soul?

What I want the students to do is climb the pinnacles of pointlessness. Like Everest, they are daunting and dangerous. And, like Everest, they have no need to justify their existence: They simply are. For those of you who have taken a liberal arts class, you have already established a base camp; you have already begun mapping the heights of uselessness in your literature and art, history and philosophy classes. When a frustrated father or concerned mother asks you why you are majoring in English, reply as did Edmund Hillary when asked why he climbed Everest: because it is there.

Yes, I know what you've been told by some of my academic colleagues. By taking these courses, you will become better citizens and better human beings. The study of philosophy will equip you to think more critically. The study of history will better prepare you for the future. And the study of English literature will … well, just what did my colleagues in English tell you, anyway? And did they keep a straight face while doing so?

These drab justifications reflect the values of our practical and utilitarian society, not the true nature of the humanities. Take history, for example. How many times have you heard from others, or heard yourself parroting, the famous line of the American thinker George Santayana: Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it?

Well, in the words of another great American thinker, Henry Ford: Bunk! As far as I can tell, whenever we try to remember the past, we condemn ourselves to make new mistakes. Past events are like snowflakes: They are by their nature unique, as are the ways in which they interact. One of the few generalizations you can make about snowflakes is, given enough of them, you've got a driveway that needs to be shoveled. So, too, with past events: Given enough of them, you've got a history that needs to be told. Apart from that, the predictive power of historians falls well below that of meteorologists and slightly above that of palm readers.

But does this mean history itself, as Ford believed, is more or less bunk? Far from it. History is not the problem; instead, we are — at least when we apply a calculus of productivity to our study of the past. Do we justify the ascent of Everest by citing advances in our understanding of oxygen deprivation on the brain? Or of Sherpa family dynamics? Heaving our past into meaningful shape, on the contrary, is vast and daunting; we make ourselves more human when we attempt to scale it with our frail tools of language and concepts.

If we remember another of Santayana's pronouncements, we may not be condemned to getting the liberal arts wrong. Music, he once observed, is essentially useless. (He added that this is also true for life, but let's not go down that path.) To say music and its kindred arts are useless is not the same as saying they are worthless. What is worthless, of course, is a world without J.S. Bach or the Beach Boys. What Santayana meant is that music has no end or goal outside itself. It is absolute and absolutely pointless.

No less pointless are great novels, great histories, great philosophies. Admittedly, some of the greatest exponents of these arts — Plato, Thucydides and Tolstoy—eventually made instrumental claims — in other words, the value of their works ultimately lay outside the works themselves. Need I quote Henry Ford again? We read these artists for the questions they posed, not for the answers they felt obliged to offer.

Here's the moment when, as guest speaker, I'm supposed to send all of you off with a great hurrah. Instead, let me just remind you of what you have done the last four years. You have learned practical skills — units of knowledge that are instrumental and goal-oriented. Use them well. But you have also steeped in impractical fields — fields that have shown you, in wonderfully complex ways, how to deepen your pleasure in reflecting on the human situation. Do not forsake them.

Ernest Hemingway once described an encounter with a fellow expatriate writer in Paris. The fellow, drunk and down on his luck, told Hemingway: “You know, Hem, what the world really needs is one good unpublished poem.” Go out into the world, graduates, and write that poem.